This Earth Week, we're highlighting our employees who work with environmental groups in their communities. Every year, residents of Alyssa Sooklal’s neighborhood volunteer their time and resources to clean a local stream on the first Saturday in April. This event is registered annually under Project Clean Stream, an initiative formed by the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay.
Project Clean Stream is “a Chesapeake seasonal clean-up where local volunteers pick up trash from parks and streams and raise awareness about the importance of individual environmental stewardship.” In 2019, Project Clean Stream’s 50,000 volunteers collected 2.5 million pounds of trash from thousands of cleanup sites.
Alyssa helps clean a local unnamed tributary in Reisterstown, MD, whose waters flow into the Gwynns Falls stream and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay. “My family and I have participated in this stream cleanup for years," Alyssa says. "It’s a small commitment to a bigger goal of keeping the Chesapeake Bay clean. This hits close to home for me, not just because I live near a stream – and the Chesapeake Bay – but because this initiative links directly to the industry that we work in.”
Normally, the most common trash item that Alyssa picks up every year has been plastic grocery bags. However, this year she encountered more disposable face masks.
